they do the same thing every night
by mnemonica
Summary: We roll like Toulouse.


**title**: They do the same thing every night  
><strong><strong>feat<strong>. **8018 [Yamamoto, Hibari]**  
><strong>rating:<strong> **pg  
><strong>warnings for <strong>just a creepy cat, living in a lonely world  
><strong>notes<strong>: written for 31_days, prompt July 21; "Something of that fire burns still."  
><strong>summary<strong>: We roll like Toulouse.

* * *

><p>-x-<p>

They tumble onto the floor like rolling dice, the cat with a fierce gleam in her eyes and Yamamoto with a crackling swatch of jealous indifference. They call it jealous indifference because Hibari believes it to be Yamamoto's first and only attempt at being evil. It chokes him up to say this so he only does it partially, eager to impress nobody and only there to watch the horizon shrink a little further and the stars fall a little faster. His pupils dilate. They do it very often, these days, especially when he wants to preach. It's all Yamamoto's fault, of course. Yamamoto's jealous indifference has led them both to live out their lives in this cage. Yamamoto's touched in the head. Yamamoto's a fuckwit. Yamamoto's hour has come. It's been coming since the first day of forever plus two and songs playing words.

Hibari never fails to remind him of it.

"You know, you're like an oxymoron, only without the oxy."

"So clever, aren't you," Yamamoto retorts.

"I'm not the one with a soul," Hibari snaps back, and then he doesn't say anything else so Yamamoto just assumes that his hour has come.

The cat jumps back into his lap.

-/-

-\-

The cat is a really lovely cat with white fur that looks more like hair, soft split ends and a tail that's been shaved to resemble a lion's tail. The cat exudes an air of collectivism that most humans are incapable of, or at least Yamamoto thinks so. The cat's tail reeks of unheralded philosophy and democracy and dessicated fish from the market. It's definitely some form of hypnosis. You could look at the cat, have one of your fingers in her hair, and slowly start falling asleep. You could fall asleep forever like this. For this reason, neither Yamamoto nor Hibari can find the heart to name the cat. It was just a cat. They couldn't christen it as simply The Cat, either, for causes that even the cat's unheralded philosophy didn't understand.

They smoke a lot around the cat. Perhaps it was just the kind of philosophical thought that encourages smoking or perhaps it was the remorse both of them felt around it, for having fought shorter and survived longer than Tsuna and Gokudera and Lambo and Sawada and Chrome and Mukuro (even _Mukuro_), for having been sucked out of the universe and locked in this metaphorical cage with the cat, maybe that's why they smoke a lot around the cat. They'll never know. And the cat certainly won't tell them.

Occasionally, the cat wrestles with Yamamoto. The cat never tries to wrestle with Hibari, so Hibari just watches the cat wrestle with Yamamoto. They do this every night, and the cat always wins. Yamamoto lands himself another scratch for a trophy and he smiles after but Hibari looks away. The fire continues to burn, and yet the cat always wins.

-/-

-\-

They don't talk about the other world.

They don't talk about missing Gokudera's snide remarks and Tsuna's bright eyes and Chrome's nonchalance and stealing the last piece of meringue in the tray, they don't talk about the lazy afternoons at the junior high and they definitely don't talk about the baseball team or the disciplinary committee. They ignore the flashes of nostalgia, because those are moments of weakness and the cat knows it as well as they do. They ignore the objective correlatives. Instead, they talk about the cat's behavior and why Yamamoto's hour is coming, they talk capitalism and pretty things and how nice it would be to install a set of Venetian blinds to the western hemisphere of the world, because in this universe the sun rises in the west and the cage harbors a tendency to travel back in time.

They don't talk about how they wished that both of them had died.

The cat jumps back into Yamamoto's lap.

-/-

-\-

"I think I'm falling asleep."

"Don't."

"I can't help it, I think I'm falling asleep."

"Don't. Are you touching the cat?"

"Maybe. I don't remember."

"Don't."

"...can't."

"GET YOUR HANDS OFF THE FUCKING CAT."

-/-

-\-

Sometimes the cat gets her way with Yamamoto, and she lowers her ass onto Yamamoto's face. The cat doesn't smell as retched as he imagined it the first time, just a little fur and some soured freedom of thought but it always smells the same. In all honesty, it is exactly what Yamamoto expects cat ass to smell like. The first incident with the cat's ass had prompted Hibari to start telling Yamamoto that his hour had come, and he hasn't stopped since. The cat continues to wrestle with Yamamoto and both of them feel sorry for it.

-/-

-\-

"You think we'll ever get out of this place?"

"Don't know. I wouldn't bet on it."

"Think Tsuna's noticed our absence yet?"

"He's probably scared himself shitless over us, yeah."

"You think we'll ever get out of this place?"

"Don't know. Fight with the cat some more, will you?"

Neither of them know when it's going to come, but it certainly will. And until it comes, the fire continues to burn.

"Your hour has arrived, you poor bastard," Hibari reminds him.

"I know it has," says Yamamoto. "I can feel it."

-x-

* * *

><p><em>existentialism v2.0, have at it.<em>


End file.
